Birth of a Nation

The film Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by D. W. Griffith, depicts the founding of the Ku Klux Klan and an idealized Southern way of life. A commercial and artistic milestone in American cinema, the film impressed its stereotyped portrayals of black men on the national consciousness through its sophisticated cinematic style, serious moral tone, epic length, and historical content.

Birth of a Nation portrays the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of white manhood against the perceived threat of Northern politicians and African-American freedmen during the Reconstruction period. The film attempted to unify white society by juxtaposing the image of manly Ku Klux Klan “knights” against a demonized image of black male sexuality and political power. A key sequence in the film shows African-American senators in the South Carolina legislature passing pro-miscegenation laws, which would allow individuals of different races to marry or cohabitate.

While many of the stereotypes of African-American men featured in the film had a long history in popular culture, the film includes the first cinematic representation of the “buck”—the young black male who is brutally aggressive, highly sexed, and thus threatening to the dominance of the white male protagonist. This threat is visually represented by the physical bodies of the actors playing each role: Gus, played by Walter Long (a white actor in blackface), is a large, muscular man, while the film's protagonist, Ben Cameron (played by Henry Walthall) has a slight build and is called “the little colonel.” One of Griffith's influential techniques was to balance the personal with the epic, and the sexualized threat posed by the young black males in the film has a range of victims: one of Cameron's sisters is attacked by Gus, another sister is threatened by a gang of black men, and Cameron's fiancée is at the mercy of a mulatto protegé of Northern politicians. During the climax of the film, with his “last-minute rescue” technique, Griffith cuts between scenes in which white men, women, and children are being menaced by black men. The Klan arrives just in time to save them all, thus dramatizing the triumph of white manhood.

Birth of a Nation's influence on popular attitudes toward African Americans was compounded by the millions of people who saw it. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan, which was reconstituted the same year the film was released, reached new highs as a direct result of the film's popularity, and the number of lynchings in 1915 increased significantly over previous years. At the same time, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) achieved national recognition through its protests against the film's negative portrayals of African-American manhood. Birth of a Nation established a lasting pattern— persisting into the late twentieth century—of stereotyping black men in film, and thereby marginalizing them in American popular culture.

The film's most problematic legacy may be its status as a cinematic masterpiece. Despite deploring its racism and its potential to perpetuate negative stereotypes of African-American masculinity, film scholars argue that Birth of a Nation must continue to be shown because of its importance to American cinema history. The film remains notorious: the [Page 53]Library of Congress's nomination of the film for inclusion in its National Film Registry in 1993 caused an outcry from the NAACP, and in 1994 the British Board of Film Classification ruled against the video release of the film. Such incidents suggest that the film—and its depictions of African-American masculinity—remain controversial.

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